The insane world of healthcare in the age of drug prohibition
Back in late January of this year, I went on record as the only philosopher in the country to point out that assisted suicide for the depressed cannot be discussed ethically without also discussing the drug prohibition which makes it necessary, at least in the minds of the depressed1. In other words, I pointed out that you cannot talk ethically about assisted suicide for the depressed without at least mentioning the fact that our government outlaws all substances that inspire and elate. I was sharing this insight in response to a New York Times article by "global healthcare reporter" Stephanie Nolen about the attempts of depressed Canadian Claire Brosseau to qualify for state assisted suicide, a story in which nobody mentioned the fact that drug prohibition had outlawed drugs that could help make Brosseau wish to live2. Surely, I felt, I merely needed to point out this glaring omission on the part of the principals in Claire's case and they would speak out against drug prohibition as a violation of Claire's right to heal, the more so in that failing to do so could lead to Claire's unnecessary death by convincing her that she was truly out of hope.
In fact, I wrote to Claire herself, urging her to stop advocating for her totally unprecedented right to be killed by the state and to advocate instead for her time-honored right to heal, to advocate instead for her right to feel relief, to advocate instead for an end to drug prohibition.
Well, it's been a frustrating but eye-opening three months – because I found that no one connected with Claire's case (not even Claire herself) saw any connection whatsoever between drug prohibition and assisted suicide for the depressed. I've written to at least 20 of the mainstream "players" in the online debate over assisted suicide for the depressed in the last three months, and I have been either ghosted or gaslighted by them all. And so I asked myself, where do I go from here? I was basically making the seemingly modest claim that drug use is better than dying, and yet people were disagreeing with me, if only implicitly. How am I supposed to argue after that? Do I have to start listing the downsides of being dead, with footnotes referencing academics who have done studies on the subject to support those conclusions? I really felt like the mainstream was gaslighting me on this topic. But I soon realized what the real take-home mes
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